There is no getting around the fact that buying a house and saving the money you need for a deposit is hard work. It can take a long time and requires a lot of discipline. So here are my tips to help keep you motivated during the long hard slog of money saving.

1. Make yourself a progress chart. You know like the ones people make when they’re raising money for charity. Each month when you get paid and you’ve transferred money to your savings, colour in another square. It can really help to actually watch yourself get closer and closer to your target. Make it pretty, make it colourful and it keep it somewhere obvious so that you can use it to motivate yourself. I’m an extremely visual person and I needed constant reminding that my hard work was paying off. When it’s just numbers in a savings account it can hard to realise that you’re steadily making any progress at all when actually each month you chip away at your total a bit more.

2. Reward yourself every time you hit a milestone. Reached 20% of your target? Go to the cinema! Reached 25%? Time for a nice dinner to celebrate! Being strict with yourself when you’re saving is really hard and requires a lot of self control. It’s far easier to stop yourself splurging if you reward your hard work with a treat. In the mean time you can plan and look forward to your next treat ready for when you hit your next goal. The one thing I found really hard to cut back on was going out for dinner so by using this to reward myself it meant I always had something fun coming up.

3. It always helps to keep the end goal in mind. Fancy a cheeky ASOS order? Work out how much it will set you back in your savings goal and then decide if it’s worth it. By actually doing the maths and factoring in how your impulse splurges will affect your overall goal it becomes easier to remind yourself it's just a top that you don't really need. Keep in mind that fashion comes and goes but you will be glad everyday when you come home to your house that you put in the hard work instead of buying an outfit you wore three times.

4. When we were in the last final struggle of buying our house my Nan went and bought us lots of little useful things ready for when we got the keys. I remember holding the rolling pin she bought me and having a really strong image of myself stood at the kitchen counter, in a house that was now mine, rolling out pastry. There was a huge amount of pride and contentment wrapped up in the little flash of the future I had dreamt up. It represented us triumphing and finally getting what we had worked so hard for and a glimpse of what it would be like to be living our own grown up life together. The emotion that it conjured up was so strong I felt like crying every time I thought about it for weeks after. I know it sounds silly but I focused on that strength of feeling when it seemed like it would all fall through and I just wanted to give up. Psychologists call this visualisation and it can really help with working towards your goals. Picture yourself being handed the keys to your own house that you bought with your own hard work.

5. It can always help if you can talk to other people going through the same thing. It can be harder to stay disciplined when you’re watching all of your friends blow their money on exciting nights out and holidays and you’re sat at home being boring. Not only can you feel cut off and isolated but you’re friends will probably find it hard to understand why it’s so important to you to save for your deposit. Reach out to other people going through the same thing (either in real life or online) so that you can chat to people who are struggling with the same things you are. When I was saving to buy a house a lot of my friends were either still in education, unemployed or were of the opinion that it was impossible for anyone our age to buy their own house. I desperately wanted to find my own tribe of people who wanted to try and do it by themselves and sadly I couldn't find any so I just got through it on my own. Since buying our house I have discovered lots of other people online who are also buying their own house who I wish I had found months ago, so reach out!

6. Spend more time with close friends and family who can offer support and help to boost your morale. There will be times when you are feeling low about saving so much money and it can feel like an impossible task. Surround yourself with people who believe in you and can lift your spirits.

7. Try to build in regular fun things on the cheap and plan your budget accordingly. It’s important to strike the balance between planning ahead for the future while also living for the here and now. Fun things don’t always have to mean expensive and saving for a deposit does not mean you have to live in purgatory. In fact dreaming up ways of enjoying yourself on a budget can be a fun task in itself and by being more creative it can help you discover new and exciting things.

8. It can take a long time to save for a deposit and I felt impossibly restless during the time. I was aware of months passing me by and I felt no closer to achieving my dream (despite inching a little closer each month but it’s hard to have that level of perspective when you’re living through it). In order to try and use the time productively I researched every aspect of buying a house I could think of. I learnt a huge amount about the legal processes because I decided knowledge was power.  I wanted to know and understand what the professionals were telling me rather than just blindly trusting their opinion because not everyone is great at their job! It also felt like something useful to do in the meantime while we were saving and it certainly came in useful when we actually came to buy our house. The fact I was prepared to call people out when they were wrong was one of the reasons that we ultimately ended up successfully buying our house. Turned out to have been time well spent in the end.So if you're feeling like you're not getting anywhere use the time to become an expert in house buying, it will definitely be time well spent. 

First time buyer blog post series

1. We bought our first house
2. Our house buying story
3. The guide to saving for a house deposit

The guide to saving for a house deposit

Housing is currently the hot topic on everyone lips. The Autumn Budget 2017 was pretty focused on it and you only have to step onto twitter to see young people talk about it quite a lot.

Mostly they’re tweeting sarcastic remarks about how they can’t afford a house because apparently they spend too much on avocado on toast, rather than because house prices are out of proportion with wages.

The problems facing our housing market our numerous and complex and this post isn’t really the place to get into it. But I do think there is more to the avocado on toast argument than many young people may think.

Sadly it isn’t as simple as just give up avocado on toast for the rest of your life and you’ll magically have enough money for a house (perhaps you don't even like avocado). To take that from the article is a gross oversimplification.

It’s more about giving up the avocado on toast lifestyle.

Plenty of people will now immediately close my blog and shake their head about ‘baby boomers who don’t understand anything’. Except I’m no boomer, I’m a fellow millennial. But crucially I’m a home owning millennial without the bank of Mum and Dad.  

There is no magical secret to how I managed it. The harsh truth is that if you want to save enough money for a house in this current day and age you have to give up the ‘have it all lifestyle’. 

You know the one I mean. 

The brunch at a fancy café on a Sunday, cocktails on a Thursday night, jetting off on holiday to exotic places, drinking Starbucks on the regular and the constant ‘treat yo’self’ mentality.

We just love to make other people think we spend all of our days casually brunching with friends, buying designer items and always going off on our newest long haul adventure. 

In reality most of us are working the day job and living this life in our spare time and by the time pay day rolls round we’ve convinced ourselves that we deserve a treat just for getting through the week.

If we’re honest a lot of the time, we live this life to look cool for the ‘gram and the rest of the time I think we do it because we think that’s what we *should* be spending our money on.

I recently saw a tweet where someone was saying how happy they were to have reached their saving goal to buy a MacBook Air in three months. I couldn’t believe how many replies the tweet had. Barely a single tweet was congratulating them on their achievement, but instead demanding to know just how did they do it?

If we take it right back to basics there are pretty much four ways to get more money:

• Steal it
• Earn it
• Invest it
• Get given it

Stealing it is hardly an option, if you were able to ask someone to give it to you then you probably wouldn’t be reading this blog post, you probably aren't working with a timescale long enough to think about investing it and like most young people you’re probably struggling to earn more money than you already get.

So if the above is true then we all know the answer is simple really. 

In order to save more money you have to spend less than you earn.

This was exactly the answer the person gave to everyone demanding to know where she magically got the money for a new MacBook Air from. It didn’t just appear in her bank account, she spent less than she earned and saved the rest.

But we don’t like to hear that you have to spend less than you earn. 

Why? Because it’s hard. 

Instead, we like to convince ourselves that there is some magical formula or skill that you have to have in order to save money and for a lot of people it seems to become their excuse as to why they don’t save any money. 

Don't get me wrong, I'm well aware of the issues surrounding stagnant wages and the increasing cost of living. It definitely effects me too. For a lot of us most of our salary just goes on keeping a roof over our head and the bills paid. But I don't think that means you should give up if you really want to own your own home because it can be done if you make it your single minded goal.

In many ways, saving money is rather like losing weight. In order to shed some pounds you have to burn off more calories than you eat. There is no magical diet or exercise regime that can work around this irrefutable fact of physics. 

But that doesn’t stop a multi billion pound industry trying to convince you otherwise. Or thousands of people with endless excuses about their metabolism or being built that way. Aside from rare cases of actual medical conditions, for the vast majority of people, if you eat less food than you burn in a day, over time you will lose weight. 

But just like saving money, people want a cheat method to get to the end goal. Sadly one doesn’t yet exist for either example.

This might not be the truth you want to hear but if you really want to own your own house, you have to close your ears to all the noise. 

You have to stop listening to people who complain to you about how easy it was for your Grandparents to buy a house and how things aren’t fair because none of that will help you.

The world doesn’t function on fair, and if you wait for it to be fair you could be waiting forever until you own your own home. Whether we like it or not buying a house is harder than it used to be so you have to learn to save as effectively as you can in the meantime. 

That means making sacrifices. Depending on how you like to spend your money those sacrifices may have to include avocado on toast. 

1. Know how much you need to borrow

This might sound counter productive, but in order to know how much you need to save for a deposit you first need to know how much money you can borrow for a mortgage. A good place to start is by using an online mortgage calculator which will calculate how much you can borrow. 

Or you can call a mortgage broker and ask them to talk you through what you can afford. 

I used London & Country and found them to be exceptionally helpful. The best part is they don’t charge a fee.

By knowing how much you can borrow you can get a better idea of what your overall house buying budget is. It’s no good thinking you can buy a £400,000 house when the most a mortgage lender will let you borrow is £200,000.

     2. Work out how much you need for a deposit

Now you know how much you can borrow, you can work out what you’ll need for a deposit. So for example, if you know you can borrow £180,000 and you want to buy a £200,000 house you’ll need to save the remainder of £20,000.

This is enough for a 10% deposit. The larger the deposit in relation to the amount you want to borrow (called the Loan to Value Ratio or LVR) the better the mortgage deal you can get. So it pays to save as big a deposit as you can.

There are mortgages available for those with a 5% deposit but these will charge more interest than those available for a 10% deposit. 

3. Add in the extras to get to your overall savings goal

When saving to buy a house, it isn’t just about the deposit. There are other additional costs to think about such as solicitors fees, mortgage fees, surveys, removal costs, stamp duty etc.

Thanks to recent changes in stamp duty you probably won't have to pay this now, but it’s worth checking if you need to budget for it, particularly if you live somewhere pricey like London. There are lots of good online calculators.

Do your research on other home moving costs, but to give you a rough idea we paid £1,300 in solicitors fees, £550 for a HomeBuyers report and £350 in mortgage fees.

Add this amount to your deposit money and that should give you your total savings goal.

     4. Work out what you’re prepared to sacrifice

This is where we come back to avocado on toast. What are you prepared to give up in order to save for a house? As we've already established that money needs to come from somewhere. 

You probably wouldn't be reading this if you had lots of disposable income so some aspects of your lifestyle will need to be reduced.

The easy ones are things like the gym membership you never use but what about the things you rightly reckon that you deserve because you work hard?

Can you give up holidays? Nights out? Quit smoking? Takeaways? Eating out? Shopping?

Do you want your own house more than you want the extras in life? Only you know the answer to that. But if you’re serious about buying your first house in the not too distant future then virtually all unnecessary spending has to stop or it will take you a VERY long time to save up.

If we’re being honest we know we waste chunks of our money on the little things. Magazines, picking up a chocolate bar when we pay for our fuel, buying sandwiches because we’re too lazy to make them.

This article has got lots of excellent advice about the small things we pretty much throw money away on and how giving it up can actually help you buy a house. 

Those little things like buying sandwiches at work can work out at thousands of pounds a year, so you may be able to claw back a fair chunk of money without too much sacrifice in some areas.

     5. Cut your living costs if you possibly can

Everyone’s situation is different so it’s almost impossible to write something that will cover everyone. But for most people their living costs take up a large proportion of their income so any saving you can make here means more money to stash away.

The most painless way to do this is to make sure you’re paying as little as possible for all utilities.

But if you can make savings on keeping a roof over your head you’re likely to make more of a difference. Ideas to consider are:

-Moving in with friends or family who are kind enough to let you pay a reduced rate.

-Sharing a flat or house if you currently live alone.

-Depending on your circumstances taking in a lodger.

-Moving in with your partner.

-Relocating to a cheaper area.

I moved back in with my parents and while I still paid them rent, it gave me the extra cash to save each month.

Obviously not everyone has these options open to them but it is worth taking a think about how you could cut back on what is probably your biggest monthly expenditure. 

     6. Look for extra ways to boost your income

The small extras you can make on the side can really add up over time.

Could you work an extra job in your spare time or do some overtime? Perhaps do some odd jobs for friends and family for a little bit of extra cash? Using cashback sites can also help to boost your income.

Selling some of your old stuff on eBay, Facebook, Gumtree or a good old fashioned car boot sale is worth trying too.

None of these are likely to make you rich. But they might give you enough for a few nice things to help keep you going while you save. 

7. Make your savings plan and stick to it

Once you have trimmed all the unnecessary spending and cut as many costs as you can you will be able to work out how much you can afford to save per month.

Whatever that figure is, you must start to see that savings goal as being non negotiable. You wouldn't accidentally spend your rent money on non essentials and your savings need to become just another outgoing in your mind.

Set up a standing order to transfer the money as soon as you get paid. This is absolutely essential. It's no use trying to be good all month and then saving whatever is left. You will just spend it (trust me, I've tried, it doesn't work).

It is also a good idea to transfer the money to an account that you can't see every time you do your regular banking. Obviously the money needs to be accessible but having it out of sight, out of mind can really help the urge to spend it all on a two week trip to Barbados. 

You can use an online calculator to help you work out how much you either how long it will take you to save the required amount or how much you need to save per month to hit a certain target date.

Use this info to make yourself a progress chart like the ones people use for raising money for charity and tick it off each month when you add more money to your savings. Doing this might sound silly, but it can really help with motivation. When you feel low, take a look at how far you've come.   

      8. The importance of staying disciplined

I recently saw another person tweeting about buying the new Naked Heat palette on the sly, because if their mum found out they would lecture them about how they’re supposed to be saving for a deposit. This person was claiming that one make up palette isn’t going to make any different to the thousands of pounds they need to buy a house.

They’re correct in some ways. £38 probably won’t make much difference providing this splurge is a one off. But if you justify this kind of purchase with this excuse a lot then you will have lots of clothes and make up, but no house to put it in.

It took Jared and I a year to save for our deposit. During that time I bought one new dress (yes that’s right, just ONE) and no new make up. We didn’t go on trips, we didn’t go out, we didn’t go on dates, we didn’t go to the cinema. We stopped all of it and only did them on very special occasions in order to keep us motivated. 

I'm not saying this to make you feel bad for treating yourself, just to remind you that you can do without things and that you always have to ask yourself, do I want this more than I want a house?

If you can afford a treat without compromising your savings plan then by all means go ahead. But ask yourself, if you can regularly afford to treat yourself to expensive things then would that money be better used if it was helping you reach your goal quicker?

Bear in mind that £100 of treating yourself a month adds up to £1,200 a year. Although not a life changing amount of money it would probably make a reasonable difference to your house deposit. 

The more disciplined you are in the short term, the quicker you will reach your goal. 

9. Staying motivated

This may sound like I'm contradicting myself from my previous point but it is important to build in rewards to keep yourself motivated. 

Otherwise it just becomes an endless monotony of working and saving.

I found the best way to do this was to plan fun things for when you reach certain saving targets. This way you encourage yourself to keep going and you look forward to hitting your next goal.

It can also help to set yourself a dedicated part of your budget for 'fun spending' even if the amount is small. We all enjoy the little things and denying yourself everything makes life no fun at all. 

Chances are you will be saving for some time so try to keep a good balance is important. 

There is a world of difference between frittering your money away on consuming things you don't really need (while complaining that you don't have enough to buy a house) and deciding how much is reasonable to spend on fun things without compromising your savings plan. 

10. Get as much help as you can

While it might seem small there is help out there for first time buyers. It won't give you enough to have a deposit overnight but you should take ALL the help you can get. 

There are two main ISAs (Individual Savings Accounts) for first time buyers. 

The first is the Help to Buy ISA and the second is the newer Lifetime ISA. 

The government will give you extra money on top of your savings (up to £1,000 a year for the Lifetime ISA at the time of writing) so it is well worth doing.

This is particularly true if you are saving as part of a couple as ISAs are individual products (the clue is in the name) so you can both have one if you are both first time buyers. This means a potential £2,000 a year between you from the government is available. 

There are pros and cons to each different ISA and you should look into which one is right for you. This guide might help you. 

In conclusion, it is 100% possible to buy a house as a young person in the UK in 2018. More and more of my friends are managing this feat (without help from family) so it can be done. It takes time and effort to save but it is worth it in the end when you get the keys to your first house. 

First Time Buyer blog post series

1.  We bought our first house
2. Our house buying story

Projects for our Garden in 2018

1. Expand our bird feeders

When we first moved into our house in late Autumn we put a bird feeder in the tree in our garden. It has taken a while for the birds to be brave enough to use it but they are now feeding from it regularly.

I'd really like to get some more feeders such as ones for sunflower seeds or fat balls to encourage more birds to visit our garden.

2. Create a mini pond

Our garden is far too small to have a decent size pond but a water source is really important for encouraging wildlife to live in your garden.

I saw this project for creating a mini pond and thought it looked like fun, as well as being small enough for our space.

It also looks super easy, which is always good for gardening novices like myself.

3. Get a bug hotel

As part of providing a home for wildlife in our garden I'd like to get a bug hotel. You can make these yourself but some of the ones you can buy are really cute.

They cost hardly any money either and it would be nice to start adding some character to our garden as it's currently pretty sparse.

4. Get a fruit tree

Our garden already has a large cherry tree (which sadly doesn't seem to fruit) and some crab apple trees but I'd really like to get some sort of potted fruit tree.

Most likely an apple tree.

We don't have space for a whole orchard but one that is compact enough for a pot would be perfect.

5. Train some climbers up our trellis

We have a trellis that separates our oil tank from the rest of the garden and I would love to grow some climbers up it to hide this eyesore from view.

My mum has a honeysuckle growing in her garden that she took as a cutting from our old house.

But the original plant was a cutting from my Grandma's garden and I really like the idea of taking a bit of it with us to our new house (particularly as honeysuckle is quite easy to grow from a cutting).

6. Grow some fruit in our hanging baskets (probably strawberries and cherry tomatoes)

I always enjoy growing tomatoes and I'd like to make the most of the small space in our garden and grow something in hanging baskets.

The added advantage is they would have the heat from the wall of the house and from the fact it faces south. Plus they're right next to our water butt for easy watering. 

7. Attempt to help our lawn recover

We have a small lawn that is currently looking a little bit sad.

My cousin (who owned the house before us) has two small children and they had a trampoline and various toys in the garden. As a result our lawn has a lot of bare patches and it quite sparse and weedy in places.

My parents bought us a lawnmower for Christmas so hopefully come Spring we can fertilise and reseed it. After that we should now be able to mow it regularly.

Fingers crossed with a bit of TLC it will recover a bit. I'm not bothered about it not being a 100% perfect ornamental lawn. It would just be nice if it was a little better.

8. Challenge myself to grow something new

I tend to grow similar things each year and I'd like to branch out this and try to grow something I haven't attempted before. Perhaps runner beans or courgettes. Something simple and that can be grown in a pot.

9. Start a compost heap

Every garden needs one, even if it's just somewhere to get rid of your lawn clippings.

Again, this is another super easy project and hopefully one that will reward me further down the line when I've got ready made compost on hand.

10. Trim our cherry tree

This is something that needs doing fairly soon while the tree is still dormant during the winter but it needs cutting back a bit. Some of the branches are quite low and it's starting to take over the garden. 

11. Get a coldframe

This would help a low with lots of different plants and I've asked my very DIY orientated sister is she could build me one. Hopefully she'll feel the urge to build something new at some point!

12. Get some patio furniture

There's not much point having a garden if you can't enjoy it! We're in need of a table and chairs so we can sit outside and use the space. 

Our budget is tight so I'll probably be on the look out for some second hand items.

13. Host a BBQ

Hopefully by the summer our garden will be a little more welcoming and it would be great to invite some family and friends over for some laid back food and drink!

Our house buying story

First off, this is an absolute monster of a blog post so you might want to grab yourself a cup of tea and settle yourself in!

The journey of buying our first house has been far from straightforward.

While we going through it I scoured the internet to see if I could find anything from someone who had experienced the same problems as us and how they had solved them. 

The internet was pretty sparse when it came to advice on the issues I was struggling with. I understood how Hermione felt when she couldn't find any reference to the Half Blood Prince in the Hogwarts library. 

I’m sure we are far from alone in our experience but I thought I would share it with you all, in case there is anyone else out there who this will help.

This post is going to be 100% honest about everything from money to how long things took. When I was looking for info I desperately wanted ALL of the details so I have tried my best to include them.

Saving for our deposit

We started our house buying journey in July 2016 straight after we both graduated. I started my first job that month and Jared started at his in August. 

We both had £1,000 each in savings each from our final pay cheques with our part time jobs we had worked while we were at university.

We were looking forward to our trip to Norway in February 2017, which we had paid for out of the holiday pay we had accrued over the last year of part time work. 

Neither of us had any personal debt or overdrafts as we had both worked part time throughout our degrees in order to avoid graduating with personal debt (student loans don’t count). 

So we both started work full time and moved back home to live with my parents. We paid them rent of £200 per month each and we both saved £500 per month. 

So each month we added another £1,000 to our savings, which was a pretty good level for us. 

We were earning above minimum wage but well below the £21,000 threshold to repay our student loans. We both also paid around £65 into our workplace pensions each month.

The point I am trying to make is that neither of us had very much money to live on as the vast majority of it was going on rent to my parents and savings. 

I was also paying £40 per week for car parking, which meant I had less than £250 to live on each month. 

We took a small break from our saving in January 2017 to pay for our the trips we went on while we were in Norway but other than that we stuck to it religiously. 

I got a better job in April 2017 and my pay rise went on repaying some money I owed to my sister. 

I contacted our mortgage broker at London & Country who told me that with my pay rise we could afford to borrow £180,000. With a 10% deposit of £20,000 that gave us a budget of £200,000, which isn’t very much for where we live but we were optimistic. 

We had a long way of saving to go for our £20,000 deposit plus stamp duty and legal fees but were making steady progress.

Finding the house

We first heard about the house in March 2017. My Nan mentioned to my that my cousin was thinking of selling her house and that it would be perfect for Jared and me. 

We were initially dubious as we were still a long way off our saving goal but decided to look into it anyway. 

The house was built in 2007 by the Rural Housing Trust and is part of a scheme for building affordable houses for local people. The idea is similar to both shared ownership and shared equity schemes.

Under this scheme, you buy a fixed proportion of the house (in our case 60%) which is similar to shared ownership. 

However, unlike shared ownership you cannot ever buy out the remaining part that you don’t own. This is to ensure that the house does not leave the scheme and is available for future residents. 

With normal shared ownership schemes you pay rent on the share you don’t own. However with houses built under this scheme you don’t pay any rent. 

You pay for the mortgage on the 60% you own and service charges to the Housing Association that is appointed to manage the property and that’s it. In our case our service charge is currently £27.50 a month. This pays for our buildings insurance and maintenance of the external shared part of the housing estate.

The house was on the market for £215,000, which meant that you were purchasing 60% at £129,000 and would then need a mortgage of £116,100 with a 10% deposit of £12,900. 

As 60% of the value of the house was only just over the threshold for Stamp Duty at the time (£125,000) we would only pay about £80 in stamp duty. 

For us this was perfect as it meant we could afford to do what we had always wanted and buy a house in the village I had grown up in as we only needed to borrow £116,100. 

Living in Wiltshire, the average property price here is well above our maximum £200,000 budget, even for a very small house.

I registered with Help to Buy South and asked my cousin to let me know when it was going on the market so that I could register my interest in the property.

Being offered the house

As I’m sure you can imagine this scheme is hugely popular and this house was the first one in the development to ever be resold. It was also the first resale of its kind that the Housing Association had ever dealt with. 

Not to put too fine a point on it, but they were clueless about how to handle this. I called up the housing association on the promised day to register my interest and was told that they had decided to delay advertising the house until the following day. However the lady I spoke to let me register my interest anyway as the house was already on their system and was ready to be advertised.

The housing association have a month to find a buyer for the property, at which point the owner (my cousin in this case) can advertise it on the open market. 

The following weekend after the house was advertised, there was a local Help to Buy homeshow and the house was featured in it. As a result more than FIFTY people registered their interest in the house. 

However, the key purpose of this scheme is to provide affordable housing for local people. As such the house has a Section 106 agreement that sets out the order of priority for people who qualify for it. 

First in line are people who live or work in our village and those with family there. I was born in the village, have lived there all my life and my entire family lives there. The house even currently belonged to my cousin! We were hopeful that there was unlikely to be someone who could beat my credentials. 

I waited an anxious week to find out if we had made the short list. At which point I got a call from the housing association saying we had made the top 5 and were invited to view the house. 

When I asked where I was in the list I was told we were currently second on the list as there was someone from the military who had registered an interest. 

For those that don’t know Shared Ownership housing schemes give priority to military personnel. 

Living where I do in Wiltshire there are members of the military quite literally everywhere, so the chances of us being offered any shared ownership house are slim to none. 

I was heart broken. The perfect house for us was about to be offered to someone else, who didn’t technically even qualify for it as they didn’t live in the village. 

I checked with my family and they told me the house was build on allotments that were previously owned by the Church and that the Parish Council had only agreed to sell the land for development because the Rural Housing Trust offer this scheme for affordable houses for local people. 

My parents urged me to find out more about it as they were convinced the Housing Association were wrong, as this house did not fall under the rules for normal shared ownership.

Whenever I spoke to the Housing Association about it, I was flatly told it was government policy that all Shared Ownership houses were offered to the military no matter what and my points about them breaking the planning agreement that the house was built on fell on deaf ears. 

I decided I needed to look into it a bit more. I downloaded all of the planning documents from Wiltshire Council and read them all in detail but there was no Section 106 agreement within them. 

I called the council instead and found out the name of the person who deals with this and got them to send me the Section 106 agreement, which clearly stated that this house was only to be offered to local people. 

I even spoke to the person in charge of this at Wiltshire Council, who assured me that I was correct and the Housing Association had it wrong. 

I sent everything onto the Housing Association and my cousin got her solicitor (who handled the house when she originally purchased it) to look into it for us.

Viewing the house

In the meantime we were invited to view the house towards the end of April 2017. As it was owned by my cousin I was vaguely familiar with it but Jared had never been there. 

We went over at 7pm as the person from the military had arranged to view the house at 6pm. 

When we arrived my cousin was furious that he had never even showed up. We were looking round the house when he knocked on the door and demanded to view the house now. Even though he was now almost two hours late and we were already there viewing it. 

My cousin asked him to ring up and make another appointment for a different time.

Viewing the house was hard, because the more I looked at it, the more I knew it was perfect for us. I was trying very hard not to fall in love with it. Jared loved it too and we both went home feeling rather deflated as the Housing Association were adamant that the planning permission for the house meant nothing compared to the government policy to offer the house to military personnel.

To top it all another couple came to view the house and one of them was also born in the village with family there. Our chances of being offered it seemed lower than ever. 

Being offered the house

The man from the military never called back and made another appointment. On Friday, a week later I received a call from the Housing Association to say that they had got their solicitors to look into the info that I and my cousins solicitors had sent them and had concluded that we were correct and that the person from the military had no claim on the house.

They then told me they were a bit stumped on how to chose between us and the other couple as we both equally qualified for the house. 

Thankfully they decided in the end to go with who had registered their interest in the house first. 

As I had registered before the house was even advertised there was no way they could offer it to anyone but us.

I walked around in a daze for the rest of the day. Jared and I went to Bath at the weekend and had a fantastic celebratory lunch at Turtle Bay and dreamt of what our new house would be like. It was such a triumphant moment I could scarcely believe my insistence and research had paid off.

Getting our Mortgage offer

The following Monday I immediately called up several local solicitors and asked for quotes. 

We decided to go with Bonallock & Bishop as they are on the Housing Association’s panel so offered us a discount. 

They were also on the panel of all the major lenders and had a solicitor who specialised in first time buyers and all types of shared ownership houses. 

I let our mortgage broker know that we had been offered the house and would like to proceed with our mortgage application. We did all of this over the phone in about 40 minutes and then we had to wait for the house to be valued by the lender.

I received a letter from the housing association on the 22^nd May 2017 formally offering us the house and setting out the timetable. 

We had to have our mortgage offer by 22^nd June, ready to exchange contracts by 22^nd July and we were to complete before 22^nd August. 

If this deadline was missed the house would have to be revalued, at which point the asking price could change and we would possibly have to reapply for our mortgage and effectively start over. 

The house was valued by the mortgage lender about ten days later and three days after that I got a call to say our mortgage offer had been accepted! 

I forwarded the copy of the mortgage to the Housing Association and they quickly approved it.  

We were so happy as this is the major hurdle for most people. I called the solicitors and instructed our searches. 

I sat and marvelled about how swimmingly everything was going and that if we continued to make good progress we should have the keys in plenty of time to meet the deadline.

Dealing with the down valuation

That was pretty much the point where the real nightmare began. If I thought I had had to battle just to be offered the house I had no idea what was in store!

A few days after I had been offered the mortgage and it arrived through the post I had a call from my mortgage broker to say there had been a mistake and that we shouldn’t have been offered the mortgage as the house had been down valued to £202,000.

The lender had not taken into account that the whole house was on the market at £215,000 and that we were only buying 60% of it at £129,000. As £202,000 is a bigger amount than £129,000 their systems had not recognised this as a down valuation and had offered is the mortgage in error. 

The mortgage valuation is where the lender sends someone to value the house to check its worth what you’re paying for it. This is in case you don’t pay your mortgage and the lender needs to sell the house, they need to make sure they can get their money back.

If it is the same value or higher than you have agreed to pay then you are good to go. If their valuation is lower than what you have agreed then you find yourself in a tricky situation.

You have pretty much three options:

1.       Walk away from the house and look for something else.

2.       Decide you are comfortable with the fact the down valuation will effect your loan to value ratio and renegotiate with the lender.

3.       Haggle with the seller and get them to drop the price.

None of these options were really available to me for the following reasons:

1.       If I walked away I was very unlikely to find another house as part of this scheme again. Plus it would cause the house my cousin was purchasing to fall through.

2.       We had to have a 10% deposit as part of the contract for buying the house. We couldn’t go down this route.

3.       In our case the seller (my cousin) doesn’t get to set the price. The Housing Association get someone to value it, you don’t get to haggle at the outset like you would normally. Plus if I made my cousin lower her price she wouldn’t have enough money to buy her new house, so she couldn’t drop the price. 

I spoke to my mortgage broker who told me he has seen this happen many times and what normally happens is the seller either agrees to lower the price or the buyer walks away. 

Often the seller will agree to lower the price as it likely any future buyer will have the same problem. 

In fact I recently read this article about down valuations becoming increasingly common so we are definitely not the only people to have experienced this.

However, I shouldn’t think many people have experienced a down valuation with the added complexity of rural shared ownership!

Our broker said the only thing we could do was to get the housing association to appeal the lenders decision. 

They agreed to do this and chose three nearby houses that had sold for comparable amounts. Personally I thought the houses they had picked were a bit dubious but I sent off the appeal anyway. 

My broker told me to accept that we were probably at the end of the road as he had only ever seen a handful of successful appeals during his entire career.

Getting our mortgage reissued

We had to wait ages for anything to happen with the appeal. 

As it turned out Halifax (our lender) had subcontracted out the valuation several times and it had to go through a chain of four people every time anything needed to happen. 

My broker had to pull a few strings but eventually we got a response and against all the odds the appeal was successful! 

The valuation was now £215,000 for the whole house again and we were back on track. Our mortgage offer was finally reissued and approved by the housing association again. 

This whole process took the best part of a month and was incredibly frustrating as the deadline was creeping ever closer. 

The Solicitor saga begins…

While all of this had been going on things were relatively quiet on the solicitor front. 

We had already instructed our searches and were waiting for the local authority one to come back. Our solicitor had held off raising enquiries with the sellers solicitor while we waited for the outcome of the appeal, so these were now raised. 

We paid our deposit monies to the solicitor and wept a little at the vast amount of money being handed over. 

The only good thing about the endless delays was it meant Jared and I had time to save the rest of the cash we needed as we were buying this house well ahead of our original schedule. 

At this point my solicitor pointed out that nowhere in the mortgage offer did Halifax confirm that they were happy with the fact we were only buying 60% of the house. She wrote to them and waited for a response. 

And so began a long and drawn out battle between our solicitors and Halifax’s legal team. 

Every time our solicitor wrote to them they wrote back telling her to check the guidance notes. 

She would respond to say she had read them cover to cover and there was nothing in there that touched on a house like this one and could they please write back to confirm they were happy with this. 

They would respond by telling her to check the guidance notes.

It was absolutely maddening. 

Nothing we did seemed to be able to get through to them. 

Our solicitor spend huge amounts of time on the phone trying to explain to people what she needed from Halifax, only to be told that she couldn’t speak to the legal team directly and that they would get the legal team to write to her. 

Our broker stepped in and got some of his senior contacts at Halifax to push it to the top of the legal teams queue. 

Eventually our solicitor received a letter stating that they were unable to respond to her points in her original letter. 

At this point I rang Halifax myself and went ballistic and I continued to ring them every day until this was sorted. 

I eventually got the name of a manager who personally sorted this out for us and a week later we received a letter from Halifax’s legal department answering each of my solicitors questions in detail. 

Why they couldn’t have done that in the first place I’ll never know. 

Our final mortgage offer was reissued once again to acknowledge the points requested by our solicitor.

By this time we were past the deadline that the Housing Association had set. 

However in the contract for the house it states the valuation carried out to set the asking price remains valid for 6 months. 

As this was carried out in April this meant the valuation lasted until October, which thankfully gave us some breathing space. 

Good thing our solicitor was on the ball and raised this or we would have been back to square one. 

Getting a new mortgage deed

Halifax’s letter told our solicitor that we would need to sign a new mortgage deed and that the Housing Association would also have to sign it. 

Our solicitor enquired as to how she could go about getting her hands on this mortgage deed, only to be told that nobody at Halifax could find it or had indeed ever seen it. 

This deed seemed to be the stuff of legend as they were confident it existed but nobody who worked there had ever come across it.

After a great deal of time wasting it was eventually located and sent to the Housing Association to approve. 

The Housing Associations solicitors then said they wouldn’t sign it and sent back a list of changes they wanted Halifax to make to it. Halifax’s solicitors of course refused to accept any of the changes. 

Our solicitor then sent the Housing Association a terse but effective email pointing out that they were being pedantic and that it is their role to help us, not obstruct us as this was now the only thing preventing us from exchanging contracts. 

The following day they replied to say they would now sign it. 

Jared and I drove into our solicitors office to sign it so that it could immediately be sent off to the Housing Association. 

It was posted on Thursday afternoon and arrived with the Housing Association on Monday morning.

At this point we were told the Housing Association could only sign documents on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, which has to be one of the most ridiculous things I’ve ever heard.

They couldn’t sign it on Monday as it hadn’t yet been processed so we would have to wait until Wednesday. I could barely sit still at work all week I was so frustrated. 

Finally on Wednesday at 4pm I got a call to say that it wouldn’t be signed today as all the directors had gone home for the afternoon. I would now have to wait til Friday. 

I was so upset I actually burst into tears and had to go and have a little cry in the toilets at work.

So it was finally Friday, which was the provisional date for signing contracts and also our solicitor's last day at her company. 

The Housing Association didn’t seal the deed until almost 5 o’clock at which point everything was put on hold over the weekend. 

Another anxious, restless weekend followed and Monday eventually rolled round. 

Exchanging contracts and completion

After many months of struggles I’m sure you can understand that I was expecting yet more problems, but actually this was the quickest and easiest part of the process.

On Monday morning I had a call from my solicitor's paralegal asking what day we would like to complete so that she could exchange contracts.

My answer was pretty much as soon as possible! 

Everyone’s solicitors conferred and I had a phone call an hour later to say that completion was set for the following Tuesday on the 19^th September and that we had now exchanged contracts. 

After so much hard work to get to this point I couldn’t help but feel a little deflated afterwards. 

I rang Jared and told him but by the time I got home from work and told my family I was just so relieved I could hardly contain myself.

The following week at work just crawled by but I spent the time trying to organise things like our internet and insurance and changing as many addresses as I could. 

Finally the big day rolled around and I had a call at about 10am to say that completion had taken place and the house was now ours. We were now officially homeowners!

In conclusion

The enormity of it still hasn’t really sank it now to be honest and sometimes I think back to how frazzled and stressed I was and I’m just so grateful that it came together in the end.

Now we have finally moved in life is starting to get back to normal. But I can totally see why people say buying a house is incredibly stressful!

If you are going through the process I hope reading our story has helped you see that things rarely go smoothly when you’re buying or selling a house.

We faced many problems and setbacks and we found a way to overcome them all in the end so hopefully you will too. 

I couldn’t recommend London and Country highly enough if you are looking for a mortgage broker. Our broker Adam Walker went above and beyond for us so many times and I’m convinced his hard work ultimately made the difference. 

Our solicitor Sarah Sams was also amazing and she worked tirelessly to make sure this all came together. Although she has moved onto pastures new we were very pleased with the service we received from Bonallack & Bishop.

Most of all we could never have done it without the endless support of our families and friends who picked us up after every set back and reminded us to keep going. So a huge thank you to them. 

For anyone out there buying a house like ours, please feel free to get in touch and I will try to help you if you are coming across similar problems to us. 

I only know one other person who has bought a house like ours as a resale and they encountered many of the same issues, particularly when it came to dealing with Halifax. 

They successfully made it through and their advice helped me enormously towards the end.

If you are currently buying a house or thinking about buying one in the future, good luck! I promise it was worth all of the stress in the end. 

First time buyer blog post series:

1. We bought our first house